They don't represent us? Synecdochal representation and the politics of occupy movements
2020; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12462
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Economic history of UK and US
ResumoIn 2011 and the ensuing years, the world witnessed a global wave of various "occupy movements," from the Spanish 15-M and the Greek anti-austerity protests of 2011 to Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and from the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul to Nuit Debout in Paris. Inspired by the Arab Spring earlier that year—and by the iconic image of an occupied Tahrir Square in particular—protesters in different parts of the world took possession of public spaces in order to oppose the austerity measures of their governments, to challenge the power of financial industries and economic elites, and to voice their widely shared experience of a democratic deficit. I emphasize from the outset that there are many, and often very substantial, demographic, cultural, economic, and political differences among these various occupy movements and among the contexts in which they intervened. There is thus no particular reason to assume, as some enthusiastic commentators suggested at the time, that they were all exponents of a single global movement (Hardt & Negri, 2012; Mason, 2011). But it is also clear, on the other hand, that they often expressed a strong sense of solidarity with each other, and referred to each another as important sources of inspiration (Graeber, 2013, p. 237). Notwithstanding the many differences between these movements, they did share at least a number of important points in common. What, then, did these movements have in common—next to the obvious but important fact that they all involved the occupation of public space (Harvey, 2012, pp. 161–162)? First, in most cases conventional political organizations or institutions played a minor role, if any, in these mass mobilizations. None was spearheaded by established political parties or politicians (Tormey, 2015, p. 8) and they often had a strikingly diverse composition (Juris, 2012, p. 265). Most categorically refused to negotiate or even engage with any representative institutions or public bodies (Klein, 2011). One possible explanation for this, second, is that many of these movements had strong horizontalist aspirations (Sitrin, 2012) and advocated direct or participatory forms of politics, organization and decision-making. Finally, not only did they propose an alternative view of democracy, but they also put it in practice: a significant aspect of their shared repertoire was that these movements sought to prefigure a radical form of democracy (Bray, 2013, p. 190; Douzinas, 2013, pp. 158–160; Hardt & Negri, 2017, pp. 274–275; Maeckelbergh, 2016; Pickerill & Krinsky, 2012; Smucker, 2014; Van de Sande, 2013; Yates, 2015). By organizing in general assemblies and spokes-councils, for example, they tried to realize, in the here and now, the kind of radical social change that they aspired to bring about on the long term (Graeber, 2013). These movements' refusal to engage with existing parties and institutions, their horizontalist or direct democratic aspirations, and their attempt to prefigure these ideals in their general assemblies and consensual decision-making procedures, have all contributed to the widespread idea that they were opposed to any form of political representation. Indeed, many prominent political philosophers and social movement theorists have promoted this view of recent occupy movements. My claim, however, is that this reading is too quick. Not only is it far from certain that all these movements dismissed political representation tout court, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that both in their rhetoric and practical organization they employed various forms of representation and of making representative claims. In fact, these movements also played a significant representative on their own part, which remains undertheorized in the current debate. What concepts of representation are implied here? And what lessons for democracy, strategy, and social movement politics may we derive from them? To answer these questions and to shift the academic debate on these occupy movements, I reconstruct two concepts of representation that can be encountered in the practices and rhetoric of occupy movements such as OWS and the 15-M movement. I focus on one concept of representation in particular that I think is the key to an adequate understanding of contemporary social movements, but that is not sufficiently theorized in the existing literature on these movements: namely, the idea of synecdochal representation, where one of the constituent parts stands for a larger whole. To address these questions I make the following argumentative steps. In Section 2, I briefly review the contemporary academic debate on occupy movements and their relation to political representation. Should the statements and practices of movements such as OWS indeed be regarded as a rejection of representation, as both their critics and advocates claim, or is their repertoire compatible with at least some forms of representation? In Section 3 I turn to the academic literature on political representation and demonstrate why it is far from obvious what representation means. Starting from Hannah Pitkin's famous work on representation, I flesh out two different categories of representation, which are both significantly political: representation as "acting for" someone else, on the one hand, and representation as "standing for" something or someone larger than itself, on the other. In Section 4 I apply these notions to the politics of recent occupy movements, and argue why both are present (implicitly as well as explicitly) in their practices and rhetoric. In Section 5 I further develop the concept of symbolic representation as "standing for," focusing on a particular form of representation that I think is the key to our understanding of recent occupy movements and their representative role, but that nevertheless remains undertheorized in the current debate: namely, synecdochal representation. I turn to the work of Ernesto Laclau, who employed this concept at various places in his oeuvre, but never developed a comprehensive theory of it. After reconstructing his concept of synecdochal representation and its political function, I finally apply it in the context of recent occupy movements in Section 6. Since the emergence of the occupy movements in 2011 and the following years, their significance and success—or the lack thereof—has been hotly debated among academics and activists. It is neither my goal to defend these movements or their strategic and organizational choices, or to downplay their critique of representative democracy in its current state. My aim, rather, is analytical: if we are to understand and appreciate this critique and its political relevance, we first need to acquire a more nuanced and accurate conception of representation and the political functions that it may serve—in the context of radical-democratic protest movements as well. Occupy Wall Street is an exercise in "direct democracy." We feel we can no longer make our voices heard as we watch our votes for change usher in the same old power structure time and again. Since we can no longer trust our elected representatives to represent us rather than their large donors, we are creating a microcosm of what democracy really looks like. We do this to inspire one another to speak up. It is a reminder to our representatives and the moneyed interests that direct them: we the people still know our power (New York City General Assembly, 2011, p. 1). This fragment, like many of the statements issued and slogans used by these occupy movements, is open to various interpretations. According to many political philosophers and social movement scholars, it suggests that OWS defies representative democracy. The statement appeals to the image of "what democracy really looks like": a more direct or participatory form of democracy, which is contrasted with representative democracy in its current flawed state. One may add to this that the demand for a more radical or participatory form of democracy was expressed even more straightforwardly in their attempts to prefigure such alternatives in practice (Lorey, 2013, p. 79; 2014, p. 44). They experimented with consensual decision-making procedures and forms of public deliberation (Bray, 2013; Cornell, 2012; Graeber, 2013) and formed alternative organizational structures (Castells, 2015; Swann, 2018). They also gave rise to their own infrastructures, to facilitate daily life in the occupy tent camp, providing themselves with means of communication (Gould-Wartofsky, 2015, p. 70), food, shelter, and education (Khalil, 2011, pp. 245–250; Howard & Pratt-Broyden, 2013). In short, these movements tried to embody their ideal of a radically different, democratic society in the here and now (Van de Sande, 2013, 230; Singer, 2016, p. 85). "This is what democracy looks like," another prominent slogan used by these occupy movements, thus can be taken literally. It referred to the concrete organizational forms and practices that these movements implemented within the confined spaces—the "microcosm," as OWS calls it in their above quoted statement—of their occupied squares. "They don't represent us!" has emerged as a powerful slogan in mobilizations all over the world. We hear it in the US, Spain, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Slovenia, and even Russia… . The slogans are not phrased as rejections of specific political representatives, but as expressions of a general rejection of the logic of representation. (Azzellini & Sitrin 2014, p. 41, italics added) The underlying assumption here is that representative democracy is essentially an oxymoron. Representation categorically precludes the people from immediate participation in the political process (Hardt & Negri, 2004, pp. 244–245; Rancière, 2006, p. 53). Real democracy, on the other hand, presupposes a horizontalist conception of organization and a rejection of "representative democracy and the empowerment of leaders that such delegation of authority" entails (Sitrin, 2012, p. 74; see also Mason, 2011, p. 45). The horizontalist or radical-democratic aspiration that the occupy movements expressed in both their practices and rhetoric is thus not merely in tension with political representation: the two are fundamentally incompatible. Interestingly, this analysis is shared by some of these movements' most prominent critics. Chantal Mouffe, for example, argues that their reluctance to engage with any representative institutions or offices reveals a misconception of the state as a "monolithic entity instead of a complex set of relations, dynamic and traversed by contradictions" (2013, pp. 118–119). On a more fundamental level, moreover, their horizontalist aspirations evince a "flawed understanding of politics" in general (2013, p. 78; see also Mouffe, 2005, pp. 107–115). Mouffe holds that a pluralist democracy simply "cannot exist without representation," because political identities are the products of discursive articulation and representative claim-making (2013, p. 126). What these movements ought to challenge, she claims, is the fact that citizens today are no longer offered alternatives to the hegemonic discourse—not our representative institutions and procedures themselves. I agree with these critics that it is "both analytically confusing and politically unwise to base democratic struggles on a wholesale rejection of all representative politics" (Teivainen, 2016, p. 33). However, I do not think that recent occupy movements such as OWS and the M-15 categorically rejected any form of political representation—nor am I convinced that their political repertoire was devoid of making all forms of representative claims. How are we going to make sense of these movements' practices and slogans such as "We are the 99%," "This is what democracy looks like" or even "They don't represent us!" without employing at least some concept of political representation (Brito Vieira, 2015, p. 506)? In the remainder of this article, I flesh out a few concepts of representation that I think are applicable to these movements. But before doing so let me first briefly elaborate on the various uses and meaning of this—often misunderstood—term. What exactly is representation? If we look more closely at how the term is employed both in academic theory and political practice it may strike us that it has several meanings and uses. As Hannah Pitkin argues in her seminal work The Concept of Representation (1967), these various uses of the term representation are "often intertwined, but their implications and consequences are very different" (Pitkin, 1967, p. 59). Pitkin divides these various uses into roughly two different categories that can be understood as a conceptual distinction similar to that made in several other European languages (Hofmann, 1974, p. 19; Sintomer, 2013, pp. 19–20; Spivak, 1988, pp. 276–277). In Dutch, German and Italian, for example, representation may be translated as vertegenwoordiging, Vertretung, or rappresentanza, respectively. What is meant, in this case, is the particular relation in which a particular representative (be it a politician, a delegate, or a lawyer) speaks, negotiates, votes, or even decides in someone else's stead. Pitkin refers to this form of representation as "acting for": "the idea of substitution or acting instead of, the idea of taking care of or acting in the interest of, and the idea of acting as a subordinate, on instructions, in accord with the wishes of another" (1967, p. 139). Usually, representation as acting for requires an explicit mandate, although this is not always the case (Mansbridge, 2003). It does, in any case, require a certain degree of responsiveness. That is to say, when understood as acting for, the legitimacy of political representation largely depends on the ability of a representative adequately and accurately to convey the opinions, preferences, or interests of a particular group or constituency that exists both independently and at a certain distance (Manin, 1997) from the representative. In the case of representative as acting for, a legitimate representative "must be responsive to [the one represented] rather than the other way around" (Pitkin, 1967, p. 140). This concept of representation is implied, for instance, in our common understanding of representative democracy. However, all the aforementioned languages also have a second term commonly translated as representation—namely, representatie, Darstellung, or rappresentazione. This is used in the way in which, for instance, a national flag, logo or symbol, or a work of art can be understood symbolically to represent something other or larger than itself. Pitkin refers to such symbolic forms of representation as "standing for".1 This does not require a formal mandate or a primordial responsiveness, nor does it necessarily refer to what a representative does. It rather implies an understanding of what a representative (be it a person, an artwork, or a symbol) is—what it "must be like to represent" (1967, p. 59).2 Neither English nor Spanish or French (which, interestingly, were the primary languages spoken in many recent occupy movements) allows us to draw this distinction: representation, representación, and représentation roughly refer to both concepts of representation: both as acting for and standing for. Even in the predominantly Anglophone academic debate on political representation the two tend to be mixed up. However, both at a theoretical and a practical level, there are important reasons to maintain a conceptual distinction between these forms of representation. As seen, the most significant difference between representation as acting for and representation as standing for is that the former often implies an explicit mandate and a certain degree of responsiveness between the representative and the thing represented. In the case of acting for, the additive re thus must be taken rather literally. Here, the re-presented is understood to precede ontologically the re-presentative. Representation as standing for, in the symbolic sense, on the other hand, has a more constructivist connotation. Symbols "are often said to represent something, to make it present by their presence, although it is not really present in fact" (Pitkin, 1967, p. 92). This is how a national flag is understood to represent something. Symbols do not correspond to an absent reality that could be presented more or less accurately. They bring something into being that did not exist as such, prior to (or independent of) its symbolization. A symbol is not merely a source of information, "is supposed to evoke or express feelings appropriate to what it stands for, and what happens to a symbolic figure must be considered as happening to its referent as well" (Pitkin, 1967, p. 99). The establishment of symbolic representations, in other words, is a gradual process that also involves the coming-to-be of certain affective or irrational associations. Thus, that which is represented in a symbolic relation of representation does not precede this relation as such. There is no unarticulated referent outside or behind the particular symbol or claim that represents it. Whereas representation as acting for implies that there is an objective and autonomous referent whose interests can be represented in a more or less accurate way; representation as a symbolic standing for suggests that the referent does not exist independently, it is brought into being through the articulation of a representative claim or relation (Disch, 2011, pp. 106–9). Although the political function of representation as acting for is more evident, that symbolic representation as standing for is of no less political relevance. Constructivist theorists of political representation, such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Michael Saward, have shown that representation as standing for plays an important role in the establishment of political discourses and identities (Disch, 2019). Saward (2010, p. 15) argues that "the active making of symbols or images of what is to be represented" is a "central aspect of political representation." By articulating a particular image of whom or what they stand for, claim-makers give rise to this precise group or constituency. This evidently does not mean that this constituency has no material pre-existence whatsoever: "there is always a referent. But the real political work lies in the active constitution of constituencies—the making of representations" (Saward, 2010, p. 51). Thus perceived, representation as standing for is an articulatory process (Laclau, 1990, pp. 38–39; 2007, p. 98): any representative claim is constitutive of its own referent in that it must be articulated in a particular way. Only in its repeated use does it acquire content and meaning. And, the other way around, the meaning of our words and identities gradually emerges from such processes of signification. Representation as standing for thus can be understood as a "process of identity construction." (Errejón & Mouffe, 2016, p. 112). This is a distinctively political process, one may add, because there is always a competition between various possible articulations. To establish one discourse or collective identity must be done at the expense of others. Or, to put it in Laclau and Mouffe's terms: any symbolic representation seeks to acquire hegemony. Its aim is to "dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre" (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 112). The question, then, is: did the practices of recent occupy movements such as the M-15 and OWS indeed eschew of any form of political representation—as many of their advocates and critics claim? And if not, how can these various forms of political representation as acting for and standing for be recognized in their rhetoric and practices? As we have seen above, the emergence of recent occupy movements is often interpreted as indicative of a categorical dismissal of political representation tout court (Azzellini & Sitrin, 2014, p. 41; Hardt & Negri, 2012, pp. 43–44; Mouffe, 2013, pp. 125–127; Tormey, 2015, p. 82). It is clear that these movements were critical of representative democracy in its current state. But now that we have distinguished between different forms of political representation, we may ask whether their politics indeed implies a wholesale rejection of all forms of representation? One important element of the politics of these occupy movements, to start with, is that both in their rhetoric and practices they sought to counterpoise representative democracy with a radically different—more direct or participatory—form of democracy. Their general assemblies, online forms of organization, and horizontalist decision-making procedures are attempts to provide a "glimpse of what real democracy might be like" (Graeber, 2013, p. xvii). This may suggest that these movements were at least very critical of representation as acting for—the idea that some may be formally entitled to speak, act, and decide in someone else's stead. But if we look more closely at both their rhetoric and their practices, these movements turn out to have a much more nuanced understanding of representation as acting for. Take, for example, the OWS communique quoted at the beginning of Section 1. Although this statement implicitly draws a distinction between real democracy and representative democracy as we know it today, it also charges "our elected representatives" for their failure to represent the people's interests adequately (New York City General Assembly, 2011, p. 1). This leaves open the possibility that there are ways to act for or on behalf of the people in a more legitimate or sufficiently democratic way. Arguably, OWS saw a role for itself in this respect: in his memoirs of the movement, OWS cofounder David Graeber (2013, p. 40) suggests that whereas both major political parties in the USA "represent the 1%, we represent the 99% whose lives are essentially left out of the equation." Moreover, it turns out that these occupy movements often employed various forms of political representation in practice. For example, a few months into the occupation of Zuccotti Park, OWS's general assembly was gradually replaced as the most important organ of decision-making by a spokes-council (Bray, 2013). Its regular meetings would be attended by delegates (or spokespeople) from each working group. This task was rotated among the members of each group, and each delegate had a mandate to voice only the working group's decisions (Graeber, 2013, p. 232). According to Mark Bray, these delegates were therefore not representatives in the strict sense "because they merely communicate the will of the smaller group" (Bray, 2013, p. 88). But arguably it would be more accurate to say that delegation or an imperative mandate is a form of representation as acting for that requires an explicit mandate and a very high degree of responsiveness. Such forms of representation are by no means incompatible with decentralized organization or even consensus-oriented decision-making. Many anarchist and radical democratic theorists have argued before that radical democracy requires various forms of recallable delegation or imperative mandate (Bookchin, 2015, p. 26; Cohn, 2006, pp. 255–256; Teivainen, 2016, p. 23; Wilson, 2014, pp. 147–148). Moreover, the emergence of new, networked forms of communication has done very little to reduce the role of leaders and representatives (Gerbaudo, 2012, p. 159; Nunes, 2014; Smucker, 2017, pp. 184–186). The real question, arguably, is not how such roles can be limited to an absolute minimum but rather how they can be frequently rotated and equally distributed. These movements' prefigurative experiments with decentralized and participatory forms of organization may have given expression to a radically different idea of democracy, but this neither necessarily implies nor requires a full-fledged dismissal of representation as acting for. What is more, many of these movements' participants have continued to engage with more conventional forms of electoral politics after their square occupations had come to an end. One obvious example is the Spanish left-populist party Podemos, which emerged in the aftermath of the 15-M movement and has had considerable electoral success at both the national and the European level (Errejón & Mouffe, 2016, pp. 70–71). For Podemos and its party leader Pablo Iglesias, this turn to an electoral strategy was no more than a logical next step (Iglesias, 2015, pp. 11–15). More striking, perhaps, is that even some anarchist activists previously involved with the 15-M movement have continued to follow an electoral strategy—in particular at the local level. In the small Spanish city Castellón, for example, anarchists took part in the formation of a new public platform named Castelló en Moviment, which ran in the local elections of 2014 (Ordóñez, Feenstra, & Franks, 2017). Some "small-a" as well as "capital-A" anarchists (Graeber, 2002; see also Gordon, 2008, pp. 23–24) are now holding representative posts in the city council. Their aim is to "change traditional mechanisms of political intermediation to create channels of citizen participation and thus transform local government into a radical, direct municipalist structure" (Ordóñez et al., 2017, p. 10). The widespread claim that the politics of these movements defied the very logic of representation thus appears to be unfounded (Azzellini & Sitrin, 2014, p. 41). Upon closer inspection it turns out that many forms of representation as acting for were deliberately employed by these movements. This suggests that their radical democratic practices and slogans could "also be read as expressing a demand for better, and more direct and participatory representation to overcome the current 'misrepresentation' of the people's will" (Gerbaudo, 2017, p. 84). However, there is also a more fundamental (and arguably more theoretical) point to be added here. For not only did these movements' mobilization and internal organization incorporate certain forms of representation as acting for, but in some respects they also fulfilled an important representative role in their own right. Movements such as OWS and the M-15 did not have, or claim to have, any mandate or legitimacy to act, negotiate, or make decisions on behalf of a larger group of people. But they nevertheless did serve as its political representatives in at least some respects. To appreciate this, however, we need to return to the second, more symbolic concept of representation that I described above; namely, representation as standing for, or Darstellung. The politics of a social movement without any form of symbolic representation is practically unimaginable. Logos, flags, slogans, and banners evidently fulfill an important symbolic function. They not only communicate a message or demand to the public, but activists also derive a sense of identity and community from them. Even the most devoted anarchist, who may reject any form of institutional representation, would surely not deny that their own black flag or their Guy Fawkes' mask stands for something (Cohn, 2006). The recent occupy movements were no exception to this. Let me once again return to the OWS statement quoted above. As established, the statement is critical of representative democracy in its current condition. But the text also adamantly states that "we the people still know our power" (New York City General Assembly, 2011, p. 1). And this "we the people"—a loaded phrase in US political history—at least implies that the General Assembly issuing this statement stands for a more encompassing "people," and does not merely act in the name of those physically present in Zuccotti Park (Butler, 2015, p. 177). A similar assessment can be made of other prominent movement slogans, such as OWS's "we are the 99%," and (somewhat ironically, perhaps), "they don't represent us!" Both slogans entail a strong representative claim (Saward, 2010) that refers to a larger group of people ("us," "the 99%"), and not merely to those who are physically present at the moment of utterance (Brito Vieira, 2015, p. 506). The prefigurative practices of these occupy movements implied a similar representative claim: the general assembly, alternative decision-making procedures and organizational structures all stood for something larger. My claim, therefore, is that the particular form of political representation, standing for, is presupposed in the practices, slogans, and rhetoric of these occupy movements. Much like representation as acting for, this form of representation is not incompatible with their radical democratic aspirations or potentials, as many social movement theorists and political philosophers would argue. In fact, I argue that it is it is implied in their prefigurative, direct democratic repertoire. In the remainder of this article, I aim to flesh out a particular concept of representation as standing for that is at stake here; namely, a synecdochal concept of representation. With Ernesto Laclau, I will argue why this particular form of representation is key to obtaining an accurate understanding of the recent occupy movements. Representation as standing for has a much wider use than representation as acting for. Works of art, symbols, protocols, or means of payment all represent something other or larger than themselves. However, as argued above, this symbolic form of representation also fulfills a distinctively political role. It is of elementary importance in the construction of collective identities. Whereas representation as acting for is a typically responsive process where a representative must seek to act or speak adequately and accurately on behalf of the represented object; representation as standing for is a "two-way process: a movement from represented to representative, and a correlative one from representat
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